Reunion thoughts...

I grew up in the extreme western end of the San Fernando Valley, just outside Los Angeles. My town, Canoga Park, used to be one of the largest orange groves anywhere. Now, it shares that end of the valley with Woodland Hills, West Hills, and Calabasas...not orange groves...just a lot of urbania.

Calabasas always seemed to be an afterthought as far as towns go. Maybe it wasn’t even officially a town. Some sort of last place to pull over and get gas and snacks on your way west on Highway 101 out of the valley. A place where Treeland was located. The location of the Motion Picture Retirement Home. A couple service stations and a bar or two. A somewhat remote spot where you could find places to “park” with your date on the weekend. That was forty years ago. Now, Calabasas is the new Studio City or Encino or Westwood. Movie stars...swimming pools...BMWs...the nouveau rich...the wannabe nouveau rich. Hulking, mansion-like homes hanging on the edge of the hills overlooking the town, hundreds more back up in the canyons that eventually find their way to Malibu. Most of the streets begin with “Park”...Park Sorrento, Park Mirasol, Park Granada, and so on. Speilberg Drive is there also. I wonder if HE lives there?

Calabasas, a mere 4.03 miles from our school, is where we decided to hold our 40th Canoga Park High School reunion last weekend. We gathered at a huge, popular watering hole and restaurant called The Sagebrush Cantina. I called it a “dump”, a “dive”, and a rustic, west valley “meat market” for the non-Hollywood, middle income types looking to hook up.
But, this blog isn’t really about a old bar with sawdust on the floor, over-priced drinks, crappy food, smelly restrooms, lousy live music, and managers and servers with typical shitty L.A. attitudes. It’s about our reunion weekend, and it just happened to be in Calabasas. The venue was actually quite incidental compared to the impressions I came away with.

I drove south on Highway 99 for about 300 miles and entered the valley around 2:00 pm Friday. From the moment I got off the freeway the nostalgia I was feeling began to dissipate. My old stomping ground had continued to undergo the transition that started the day I left almost forty years ago. Something had happened. Not an over night thing. But something that wasn’t good. One way to describe it cinematically is that my beloved San Fernando Valley now looks like a cross between Blade Runner and Back to the Future II. I kept expecting to see billboards with pictures of Biff Tannen on them directing me to his latest real estate or business venture...or that casino. I’m sure at night there are huge flames venting out of the tops of the buildings and air-cars flying around between the skyscrapers.

There are no traffic problem times in L.A. The traffic sucks all day every day. It’s a constant swarm of cars traveling on all the roads, always honking at something or someone. The volume of automobiles transversing the streets never subsides according some old friends I met there. It’s always fucked up! They even have full-blown traffic reports on the radio and TV news on Sundays. Defensive driving was invented in L.A.; you must be a defensive driver to survive there.

All the land is taken. Where there aren’t homes, there are stores or apartments. Where once there was a familiar store, there is now an unfamiliar store. Nothing looked the same. My little home town, Canoga Park, could be located anywhere in Mexico. Other parts of the valley...Thailand or Cambodia or who knows where? Nothing...no signs...are in English any longer. To quote Bruce Hornsby...that’s just The Way That It Is now.

We made it safely to our motel room in Calabasas. The reunion weekend was afoot.

Saturday morning we managed to squeeze in a 90 minute driving tour of our old town, trying to find things that looked familiar, like the houses we lived in and our old neighborhoods. We did that. We did that five years ago at the 35th reunion, and at the 20th reunion twenty years ago. We’ll do it again at the 45th and the 50th. Our Bob’s Big Boy, Canoga High School's quintessential hangout, had long since been razed and replaced by a Mexican Super Market and strip mall. Gone. Poof! Pretty much says it all.

My house looked somewhat familiar, but more like something I had seen in a hundred disturbing dreams...that alternate reality that stems from the difference between perception and the real world. It was where I grew up, but not really. My house actually looked better this time than it did five years ago. I guess someone moved in at 6655 Melba Avenue with some semblance of pride. The street looked good. Huge birch trees planted on the parkway along the sidewalk in 1957 now over-hang the entire street, touching the ones on the other side of the street, totally shaded. It is now quite a mature, respectable looking neighborhood. Fifty years will do that! Regarding one’s old neighborhood...you can never go back.

(More to come tomorrow)...